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At the website for the Columbus (Mississippi) Dispatch, a commenter recounted portions of my recent Reason piece on bad prosecutors to make the case against reelecting District Attorney Forrest Allgood. Allgood responded with a lengthy letter of his own.

Allgood’s letter purports to include a bunch of documentation I don’t have, and that the newspaper didn’t print. But after running Allgood’s letter by my sources, I stand by my reporting. He is right that I did not contact his office for comment before that most recent article was published. Perhaps I should have. But that article a summary of my previous reporting. And I’ve contacted his office numerous times in the past requesting comment. He has never returned my calls.

But Tyler Edmonds, one of the victims of Allgood’s prosecutorial overreach, did respond to Allgood’s letter. Edmonds’ thorough rebuttal does a great job exposing Allgood’s slipperiness.

In any case, Allgood was reelected once again last week, and by a nearly two-to-one margin. (Interestingly, he did lose his home county.) In the end, the guy who has seen two people he convicted of murder later exonerated by DNA evidence, and two more later acquitted after appeals courts threw out the convictions due to prosecutorial misconduct and the use of faulty forensic testimony, the guy who once compared disgraced “bite mark expert” Michael West to Galileo . . . will get another term.

11 Responses to “Allgood vs. Edmonds”

people just don’t pay attention to those ballots. It sucks, but I admit I am guilty of it myself.

Usually my choice is between 2 people I have never heard of. I tend to vote against incumbents because of my libertarian streak, but I think most people probably go the other way and just vote for the guy who has the job.

The only questions that arise in my mind are, “HOW could anyone vote for this man? WHAT were the people of Mississippi’s District 16 thinking (assuming they thought anything at all)?” This is the sort of thing that has reduced my faith in American democracy to zero.

The lesson is that justice and politics cannot possibly mix. If juries can be chosen randomly from a list, so can prosecuters, DAs and judges, etc. and term limited to one. If they can’t understand the law, the law should be nullified, and legislatures should be held accountable even in retrospect. If this reduced the number of laws by a factor of 100X, there would still be too many laws.

I would not say that this is an indictment of democracy per se. The “tyranny of the majority” is well known.

In parts of Mississippi, it was a real tyranny of men with guns and torches, ready for a lynching. The solution then was a combination of giving power to individuals to protect themselves against the mob, legal redress in Federal Courts, and Federal oversight.

Now, we have graduated to electing people who do the lynching for us. The solutions are the same. In the absence of Federal oversight, we need to allow people to protect themselves which means that prosecutors should bear the consequences of denying people their rights.

End prosecutorial immunity, and make it easier to sue malicious prosecutors.